Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 17:57:27 -0700 From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@monkeys.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Some serious gripes about `fdisk' and also `booteasy'. Message-ID: <7377.940121847@monkeys.com>
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This had bitten me twice now. Will whoever is supporting/maintaining the `fdisk' program *PLEASE* fix it so that it displays some sort of a warning when the user is just about to partition a SCSI drive for which the on/off status of BIOS address trans- lation (for disks larger than 1GB) _cannot_ be automatically and properly determined by fdisk itself? You have no idea how annoying and aggravating it is to spend half a day installing a whole new fresh FreeBSD only to find out (after you are all done) that the damn thing won't even boot because fdisk defaulted to assuming a disk geometry that is just plain wrong/dysfunctional. And of course, to add insult to injury, it ain't even all that obvious what the hell is actually wrong when this sort of mistake gets made. The `booteasy' boot manager just sits there, stupidly, prompting you to hit `F1' while it endlessly just beeps at you. That's it. Just endless beeping. No error message, no nuttin'. At first, I thought that I had a bad keyboard or something, and thus, I tried swapping it for another one! (But of course, that made no difference.) This is not my idea of ``user friendly''. If `booteasy' is unable to boot from a given drive or from a given partition, couldn't it at least say something like `Error 473 - Return to continue'? I mean I _do_ understand that memory space in the boot routine is very minimal, but at least there should be room for something small like that! Then, in addition, _someplace_ (e.g. in man pages and/or on the FreeBSD.Org website) there could be a description of `Error 473' that says something like ``This error (473) means that you probably bozoed the geometry on your SCSI drive when you partitioned it. Back up and try again.'' That would be at least a little bit more friendly that the current behavior (of booteasy) which is just to sit there and beep at you as if you've got a broken keyboard or something. Sorry if this letter sounds too negative. I'm _am_ a big fan of the OS, but as noted above, it is REALLY annoying to learn that you've wasted half a day because of errors and warnings that you DIDN'T get. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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